I recently had to reinstall Raspbmc for the 4th time in as many days, thanks to an automatic update, sunspot activity, and possibly an intermittently dodgy SD card.

Latest attempt seems to be working (touch wood); the Pi hasn’t bricked itself yet, and the networking is still working. However, fan art is not being downloaded.

This is a note to self, but might be of use to those of you in a similar situation.

The Problem

You’re running XBMC/Raspbmc on a box in your home network. This network sits behind a combined Squid + Privoxy proxy, to provide network level object caching and malware/advert filtering.

You update your library, and while TV season descriptions are loaded, season images and fan art are not.

The Solution

What seems to be happening is that Privoxy is incorrectly identifying fan art images as adverts, which is causing Privoxy to return a 403 error when XBMC attempts to retrieve the resource. This only seems to be happening with the thetvdb scraper, the IMDB scraper for movies seems to have no issue.

The fix is simple, all you need to do is add an exception for thetvdb.com in your /etc/privoxy/user.actions file:

{ allow-ads }
.thetvdb.com

Now you should find that season fan art is accessible once more!